I'm biased as someone who used to work in email marketing, but I'd say there are some important differences between respectable email marketing and spam:
* Respectable email marketing = you have a pre-existing relationship (e.g. account on their website); spam = they found your address somewhere
* Respectable email marketing = there's an unsubscribe link that works; spam = no unsubscribe link or it doesn't work
(Could very well be that the people you're working with were actually spammers)
It also doesn't mean that I consented to receiving marketing emails when I overlooked a checkbox at the bottom of your order/checkout page when I purchased something. Ethical companies will make this an opt-in choice, not opt-out.
Agreed; this is gross. If I've signed up for an account on someone's site, all I'm implicitly consenting to are transactional emails related to the service (or product, if there is one). Things like shipping notifications and billing reminders and such.
And if you at least have a checkbox for consent for marketing emails during signup, it should be unchecked by default. I'm so tired of this crap.
It dawned on me 10-20 hours into the gig that these customers were professional spammers, and that I was helping them avoid being blacklisted.
I scrapped everything I’d made and eventually paid back my fee.